A reviewer has called this the best book of American movie criticism since Agee on Film (1958) and he may be right. At least I can’t think of anything better in that interim. (Not that, as I’m sure the author would be the first to agree, there’s been much competition.) It is exhilarating to come across film criticism that is both sophisticated and readable, lively without being nutty. A book, as they say, that it is hard to put down. In both senses. Miss Kael writes with wit, clarity and precision (the flip title is a lapse - and what did she lose at the movies ? ) ; she is sensible and she knows her subject thoroughly. She is good at generalizing: the two long essays that open the book are full of original and, in my view, accurate ideas on the aesthetics and sociology of today’s movies and their audiences and critics...

Miss Kael is as ungenerous toward other critics as she is obsessed by them. She appears to consider them, almost without exception, as either rivals or butts or, usually, both. As if her security depended on eliminating all rivals to the throne... Kael’s admiration and respect are for my moral rather than my mental qualities, since, of the thirteen references to me in the index, five are neutral while eight are hostile and, in most cases, unfair... Maybe I Lost It At The Movies isn’t as good a book as I thought it was when I began this review. And the hell with that “respect and admiration.

I am not certain just what Miss Kael thinks she lost at the movies, but it was assuredly neither her wit nor her wits. Her collected essays confirm what those of us who have encountered them separately over the last few years, mostly in rather small journals, have suspected—that she is the sanest, saltiest, most resourceful and least attitudinizing movie critic currently in practice in the United States...

That she is able to analyze her instinct so well and so wittily and to convey its findings without the slightest sense of strain makes her criticism seem like art itself, something of a mystery and something of a miracle. In the end, one is a little awed by the mystery, more than a little grateful for the miracle. Miss Kael may have lost something at the movies, but in her book we have found something—the critic the movies have deserved and needed for so long.